Let me get this straight. Republicans spent Friday cosplaying machismo by encouraging their supporters to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon, which was 11 miles up in the atmosphere, a balloon so large it could hold an entire football stadium inside of it. No consideration of the danger of their useless bullets falling back to earth.

Meanwhile, Biden had already given the order to the military to shoot it down when it was safe to do so back on *Wednesday.* They had already jammed their signals so it couldn’t send any info back to China, and instead was collecting info on the satellite.

So as usual, we have Republicans acting like idiots, encouraging actions that posed danger to the American people, all the while hoping to “stick it to Biden,” when in actuality, Biden had already handled the situation days before by involving the military who had neutralized the threat and then ultimately shot down the balloon over the waters past South Carolina.

Vote blue, people. #news

If anyone knows a journalist that might be interested in a story on musk's gating the Twitter API and its effect on accessibility on Twitter, I'd love to talk to them. The rallying cry is currently #SaveA11yBots

Please boost 💜

Yea, we're fucked aren't we?
Just had a newer person hop into a network engineering discord with a question about proxies, with the opening line being basically "I asked a chatbot (chatgpt), but it said that I couldn't do this thing with proxies so now I'm really confused".

If you're trying to learn anything, but especially fields requiring creativity or inquisitiveness, for the love of the server gods please do not make a convincing sounding language model your first stop and definitely do not let it tell you what is and is not possible.

Some of my most memorable work has been around bending tech into things either at the edges of or beyond what it was envisioned to do, driven by digging into the guts of how things functioned, not constrained by what vendor docs or a robot told me is or is not possible.

What would you say if a state in Germany today were to outlaw the teaching of any critical reading of history, suppress inquiry into structural/systemic antisemitism, and ban books by the most prominent Jewish intellectuals?

The equivalent is happening in Florida.

A thread:

https://mastodon.social/@tzimmer_history/109802494389110893

The U.S. Supreme Court is a dumpster fire.

-- Supreme Court justices used personal emails for work
-- ‘burn bags’ were left open in hallways,
-- Staff afraid to confront justices on bad security practices

Here's the news story:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/04/politics/supreme-court-email-burn-bags-leak-investigation/index.html

And the SCOTUS report: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/19/politics/read-scotus-report-dobbs/index.html

#SCOTUS #SupremeCourt #transparency

Not going to lie, Twitter killing off free API access hits me in the feels. I remember with great affection the flood of creativity that happened after we opened up the API, and it's heartbreaking to see that unceremoniously strangled.

I'm relieved that we've got better alternatives, though. While this is perhaps the final straw for many bots on Twitter, it's been a long time coming and the API has long been hobbled compared to the early days. Open protocols or bust. ✊